Ann: The Mermaid’s Daughter isn’t a retelling of The Little Mermaid so much as a reimagining, beginning with “What if …?” What if the mermaid who fell in love with a prince so many years ago didn’t get her happy ending (like she does in the Disney film) or give him up selflessly and turn into seafoam (as she does in the original story)? What if she just loses this faithless man and has to live out her life on land … and what if her pain lives on in her daughter and her daughter’s daughter? And because I was interested in staying (mostly) grounded in reality, this also becomes a story of finding ways to make magic out of the tools we all have at our disposal: love and faith and art.

Joyce: What inspires your book ideas?

Ann: I’m obsessed with fairy tales, but I’m less interested in just retelling a story than in juxtaposing fairy tales and magic with the “real” world and seeing what happens.

Joyce: Is there anything interesting that’s happened to you while doing research for a book?

Ann: When I went to Ireland to research The Mermaid’s Daughter, I knew I’d need to get out on the water and find a way to write about it that conveyed the intense emotion that my main character, Kathleen, has in response to it. I took the ferry out to Inish Mór, an island off the coast, and on the way back to the mainland we got caught in a terrible storm. I was so seasick I had to huddle on the deck in this driving rain, but even while I was shivering and trying not to throw up there was a part of me that knew this was exactly the experience I needed to have.

Joyce: Would you like to share a favorite moment from your writing career?

Ann: When my 7-year-old saw the poster for my book in our local Barnes & Noble, he did this hilariously theatrical double-take and then started jumping up and down and asking why everyone in the store wasn’t rushing over to meet me because I was FAMOUS. The people standing near enough to hear him were in stitches.

Ann: I’ve gotten over a lot of tricky sections by thinking past the block while making a pan of brownies, writing frantically while they bake, and then eating straight out of the pan. With a fork.

Joyce: LOL! What are three romance novels on your to-be-read list?

Ann: Elinor Lipman’s On Turpentine Lane because her stories are brilliant, funny and flawlessly plotted; Mary Balogh’s Someone to Love and the sequels, because Mary Balogh does Regency like nobody’s business; Stella Newman’s Seven Steps to Happiness, because I absolutely loved her previous books and just haven’t gotten to this one yet.

Joyce: What would be your dream vacation?

Ann: Two weeks at a beautiful beach house in Key West with a housecleaner and a private chef … and Mary Poppins on retainer for the second week to whisk the children away so my husband and I could, for example, sleep past seven.

Joyce: What’s coming next?

Ann: Umm … a novel about Rumpelstiltskin, peacocks and the plague.

Joyce: Thanks, Ann!

About The Mermaid’s Daughter:

Since childhood, Kathleen has been plagued by bizarre maladies, from stabbing pains in her feet to the terrifying sensation of her tongue being cut out. Teams of doctors have been unable to diagnosis her, and only the touch of seawater temporarily eases her pain.

Studying opera at a top conservatory, Kathleen shows tremendous promise as a soprano, but her phantom pains and obsession with the sea grow more debilitating every day. Her girlfriend Harry, a talented singer in her own right, worries Kathleen will suffer the same fate as her mother and grandmother. When Kathleen has yet another dangerous breakdown, Harry convinces her to return to her Irish birthplace to try and make sense of a legacy of tragedy.

But in Ireland, they soon discover Kathleen’s family history is far older and darker than either could have imagined. Kathleen’s fate seems sealed, and the only way out is to make the worst choice of all—ending her lover’s life or her own.

About Ann

An inveterate reader of fairy tales, Ann Claycomb believes in the power of faerie, chocolate, and a good workout, in no particular order. Writing the novel that became The Mermaid’s Daughter, took—as her daughter is fond of telling people—“a long time. Like, a really long time.” Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her realist short fiction, Ann is nonetheless drawn to retelling fairy tales to highlight the thorns around the beautiful castles and the dangers of things that seem too good to be true (they usually are). She lives with her husband, three children, and two cats in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she is at work on her next novel.